The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide

There can be little doubt that the land on which Dr Ghanem’s home stands has belonged to his family for generations. From the salon, visitors can see the old stone foundations of his grandparents’ house. A few years ago he had decided, with the arrival of his own children, that he and his wife Ahlam could no longer live in his parents’ apartment; they would build a home on the only land the family had left. But the authorities refused him a building permit. Effectively branded criminals by the state—like tens of thousands of Arab families—he and Ahlam had been paying regular heavy fines ever since, as much as £15,000 sterling a time, to ward off demolition. Their lives have become a routine of paying the state to prevent the destruction of everything they hold dear.

The question that echoed in my mind as I heard Dr Ghanem’s story was: where were he and his family supposed to live? What was the future envisaged for them by the state? I knew well that there were endless housing developments springing up all over Israel, and illegally in the occupied territories, for Jewish families. But where was the next generation of Arab citizens to live? Dr Ghanem and Ahlam are the pillars not only of their own community in Shaab, but of the whole Arab community inside Israel. Nonetheless, the state is forcing them to live with a terrible threat hanging over their heads. They are raising their children in an environment of continual insecurity. Every day when they leave home they do not know whether they will return to find a pile of rubble. They have been made to live in an unstable world which I have no doubt is deeply damaging to them and their children.

My meeting with Dr Ghanem ended uncomfortably. In a matter-of-fact tone he asked me whether I had made aliya, whether I had claimed my right as a Jew to come to live in a country from which the overwhelming majority of his people had been expelled little more than half a century earlier. These Palestinians still live in refugee camps across the Middle East, refused the opportunity to return to their former homes in Israel. It was the first time I hesitated to answer this question. I understood that my privileges as a Jewish immigrant had come at the expense of his people. Sitting in his home, reality finally hit me. The intoxicating power trip had come to an abrupt halt.

As is my way, I could not live long in ignorance. So I began the long and difficult task of becoming informed. I read and absorbed anything I could find on the position of the Israeli Arabs, questioning the official narrative. My left-wing friends in Tel Aviv, mainly academics and people working in non-profit organisations whom I had met through a fellow inmate of the absorption centre, were quick to reassure me they had Arab friends. I asked who exactly were these friends? Where did they live? What did they talk about together? The reply was always more or less the same. They were on good terms with the owner of an Arab restaurant where the felafel was excellent. Or they got their car fixed in a garage in an Arab village where the prices were low. What did they talk to these ‘friends’ about? When did they meet outside these formal relationships? What intimacies did they exchange? The Tel Aviv crowd looked at me aghast, as if I were crazy. They did not have those sorts of relationships with Arabs.

In fact, it was clear they had no Arab friends at all. I was mortified. The revelation that I had stumbled across the same kind of master-servant relationship as exists in South Africa was something I was little prepared for. For a week I was racked by pains in my stomach and head. It was as if I was purging myself of all the lies I had been raised on.

When I was stronger, I returned to Tamra. Asad Ghanem’s wife Ahlam invited me to spend the night with them. We ate dinner together, and then she and I sat on the terrace in the warm evening air and talked. We exchanged confidences and intimacies that people rarely share until they have known each other for a long time. I remember thinking as we sat close together that here were an Arab and a Jew getting to know each other at a very deep and personal level, and that this was the way it was supposed to be. Cut off briefly from a society that always privileges Jews, we could feel like equals. I went back to Tel Aviv firm in my resolution that something in my life would have to change. Israel, as it was presently constituted, required me to choose a side: would I carry on with my life in Tel Aviv, turning a blind eye like everyone else to the suffering of the Arab population; or would I do something to highlight the reality and work towards changing it?

As it happened, my mind was effectively made up for me. I started to see much more clearly the paternalistic and colonialist attitudes of my left-wing friends. Being around them became unbearably suffocating. Invited in the winter of 2001 by Asad to teach English to Arab professionals at his Ibn Khaldun Association in Tamra, I had little hesitation in agreeing to take up the position. The Abu Hayjas, whom I knew through my work for Mahapach, offered to rent me the empty top-floor flat in their home, on the hillside overlooking the town’s central mosque.

I knew breaking away from the Jewish collective would be traumatic, but I could not know how profoundly I would alienate those I thought I was close to. Almost overnight I lost my Jewish friends. Individualism is highly prized in many societies, but not in Israel, where the instinct of the herd prevails. Doubtless the reasons can be found in Jewish history, in the centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. There is an attitude of you’re either with us or against us. No one should step outside the consensus, or question it, because this is seen as weakening the group. But human beings are immeasurably more important to me than labels or institutions. By choosing to live as a Jew in a town of Muslims I hoped I could show that the fear that divides us is unrealistic. It is based on ignorance, an ignorance that the state of Israel tries to encourage among its Jewish citizens to keep them apart from their Arab neighbours. I know Jews who have lived on a left-wing kibbutz near Tamra, yet have never ventured into the largest Arab community in their area.

I have pondered long and hard why I was able to break away from the Jewish collective when other Israelis and Jews feel so bound to it, prisoners of a belief that they must stand with their state and their people, right or wrong. At the core of modern Jewish identity is the idea of victimhood, shaped by our history of persecution and the singular outrage of the Holocaust. The sense among Jews in Israel and the Diaspora that they are uniquely victims, both as individuals and as an ethnic group, cannot be overstated. Victimhood has become something akin to a cult among Jews, even among the most successful in Europe and America. It is developed as part of the Jewish nationalist ideology of Zionism, creating an ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ world for most Jews: they sincerely and incontrovertibly believe that Israel, a nation with one of the strongest armies in the world, backed by the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, is in imminent danger of annihilation either from its Arab neighbours or from the remnants of the Palestinian people living in the occupied territories.

The improbability of this scenario, however, can safely be ignored by most Jews as long as suicide bombers wreak intermittent devastation on crowded buses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. No one can say I do not understand the suffering inflicted on families by these attacks. One day I was waiting at Ben-Gurion airport for a flight to the UK when a good friend called, her voice barely audible, to tell me that her son, a serving soldier, had been horrifically injured by a suicide bomber. I had introduced this young man to my daughter Tanya the previous summer, and the two had formed a deep bond. Since then he has undergone more than thirty-five operations to try to repair the damage done to his body. His father has suffered eight heart attacks. All their expectations about their life were destroyed in an instant. That suicide bombing has torn apart the lives of my friends as easily as a piece of paper can be ripped.

But while I understand that these attacks can be terribly destruc-fitive of Israelis’ lives and their sense of their own security, they can easily become an excuse not to confront the reality of what is taking place, the wider picture. They can simply reinforce in a very negative fashion this sense of Jewish victimhood. I understand this well. Like most Jews, I was brought up to see myself as a victim too: in a collective sense, as a Jew raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, and in an individual sense, as a Jew growing up in a post-war Britain tinged with anti-Semitism.

I was born in January 1949 into the grey, tired world of Britain under rationing. My family in Grays, Essex, appeared to me even at a very young age to be unlike those around me: there were no grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts or uncles. My father’s family were thousands of miles away in South Africa, and my mother’s immediate family were all dead, victims of the First World War, tuberculosis and bad luck. There were only me and my parents. But my isolation did not end there. My parents, preoccupied with the heavy duties of running a successful medical practice, abandoned me to the care of the cleaning lady. I was banned from playing with the local ‘rough’ children, who arrived with the building of a council estate near our home, and instead consoled myself with games with our Golden Retriever dog, Laddie, and my rubber doll, Pandora, in the back garden.

My only early recollection of true friendship is with a black servant called Inyoni who looked after me—effectively as a substitute mother—when I was two years old, when my father tried a brief experiment in returning to South Africa. It did not last long: after spending six months just outside Cape Town we headed back to Britain. But Inyoni is a vivid feature in all my memories of that period in South Africa, much more so than my grandparents, whom I can barely recall. In that half-year I formed a deep attachment to him. He would teach me to strap Pandora to my back and carry her the way the local black women carried their babies. (Back in Essex I would see other little girls in the street holding their dolls in their arms and tell them off, showing them how to do it properly.) I would also spend hours squatting with Inyoni on the floor in his servant quarters at the back of the house as he prepared the vegetables. At other times we would play tea-party games on the lawn with Pandora. After my family left South Africa in 1952 I felt the loss of Inyoni deeply.

I was a sickly child, suffering repeated bouts of severe sinusitis which served only to provoke anger and resentment in my father, whose repeated interventions with drugs and operations failed to improve my condition. In total contrast to the way he treated his patients, he had no sympathy for my suffering and would simply tell me to get a grip on myself. I suppose to a highly respected doctor my recurrent illnesses must have seemed like a reproof: in the very heart of his family was a sick child he was powerless to heal. This failure was compounded, in his eyes, by my lack of success at school by any of the yardsticks he held dear. The many days I missed from school, and his overbearing demands, took their toll on my academic performance. I was constantly being dragged off to teacher-parent meetings to discuss my poor results. Eventually, at the age of seven I was packed off to the first of my boarding schools, cut off from contact with my parents apart from one weekend out of every three. Even when I returned home my father was usually too busy with patients to spend time with me.

Before leaving for boarding school, during the long periods when I was sick at home my father would lock me in my room with what he considered educational material. He would give me a National Geographic magazine to read, or throw me a pile of postcards he had been sent from around the world and demand that I find the country or city they had been posted from in an atlas. Sometimes he would want me to draw the outline of the country too. I would be beaten if I could not answer his questions on his return. By the age of six I was an expert at finding foreign places.

There were compensations in this harsh regime, trapped in the small world of my bedroom, deprived of companions. The biggest was the National Geographic itself, which opened up another, far more exciting, world to me. In my head I had incredible adventures in places most British children had never heard of. Remote South American hill tribes became my friends, as did the pygmies of the Congo. They never seemed any stranger to me, maybe less so, than the children at school. My favourite place was the Himalayas, somewhere that looked awe-inspiring and magnificent; I would think that if only I could climb to the very top I would be able to see the whole world. I felt a huge desire to go to these places and experience them for myself.

One of the features in the National Geographic that fascinated me most was about India. I was attracted to the pictures of that country, as I was to those of Africa, because of the bright colours, the beauty of the landscapes, the different way of life and the great variety of groups living within one subcontinent. What fascinated me most about India was the caste system, and in particular the group classified as the lowest caste: the Untouchables. I would study the pictures that accompanied the article, and then read the copy that explained that the Untouchables were supposed to be the ugliest, dirtiest, most stupid Indians, and had to live on the outskirts of the towns. I would trace my fingers first around the faces of the Untouchables and then around those of the highest caste, the Brahmans, flicking backwards and forwards between the pictures. But however long I looked at them, I could not see where the difference lay. Why were the Untouchables supposed to be uglier? I could not understand how you could designate one group as dirtier or less worthy than another.

Although I have always rejected this fear of the Other, and the racism that it inevitably fuels, I have learned from experience that it is a deeply rooted need in the human psyche. At the slightest provocation we will put distance between ourselves and those we cannot or do not want to understand. At an early stage of the Aids crisis I trained to be a therapist at Great Ormond Street hospital in London. In the late 1980s, when without the slightest shred of scientific evidence there were stories all over the British media warning that Aids was highly contagious, I was working at the London Lighthouse Project with infected women and children, and with the partners of infected people. At the Project we tried to challenge people’s prejudices by bringing Aids into the community: we even established a commercial restaurant, where the staff were all Aidsor HIV-infected, so people could see that they were not going to catch the disease simply by eating there.

Nonetheless, some evenings I would attend social functions with my husband Michael, and would wait for the moment when another guest would ask what I did. My reply—that I was an HIV/Aids counsellor—always elicited the same response: overwhelmed with revulsion, the other person would take a step back. There was a double disgust: the fear that I might be carrying that terrible disease, and also the incomprehension that a nice, presentable middle-class woman would be doing a ‘dirty’ job like mine. It was as though they thought they were shaking the hand of a Brahman only to discover that they had been tricked into making contact with an Untouchable.

Moving to Tamra seemed to cause equivalent offence to my former Jewish friends. While Israeli Jews looked at the Palestinian uprising and responded by choosing to disengage—either by building a wall to separate themselves from the occupied population their army rules over or, inside Israel, by boycotting Arab areas, refusing to buy felafel or get their cars fixed in Arab garages—I elected to put myself right in the middle of the problem. To join the Untouchables. The response of my friends, like that of the well-heeled party crowd in London, was to withdraw in revulsion. Now that I am outside the Jewish collective, outside the herd, I must be treated like the enemy, as if I have committed a crime of treason or incitement.

Although the decision to leave Tel Aviv and cross the ethnic divide seemed the natural reaction to my new understanding of what was happening inside Israel, it was never easy. There were days when I felt tearful and isolated. I cried not out of fear but out of a terrible sense of how much my country was failing not just its Arab citizens but also its Jewish ones, and how catastrophically fragmented it was growing. It dawned on me at an early stage that I had to be 100 per cent committed to my new course. My Jewish friends chose to dismiss my decision as a silly passing episode, and even some of my new friends in Tamra appeared to doubt whether I could withstand the pressures. Hassan’s son Khalil said to me in the first few days: ‘After three months you’ll go back. You won’t be able to stand it here without cinemas at the end of the road or elegant restaurants.’

Neither side could understand why anyone would choose a primitive life over a sophisticated one. There was a double error in this thinking. First, I never saw Tamra as more primitive. Life was simpler, certainly, but my view has always been that life’s greatest pleasures are simple. Second, it ignored the fact that there are some values more important than being comfortable, such as developing a consciousness about the rights and wrongs of the society one lives in, and an awareness of what each of us can contribute to improving it. In this sense the sophistication of the West increasingly appears to me to be a veneer, concealing the fact that most of us have lost our understanding of where our communities are heading. We are encouraged to believe in the sanctity of the safe little bubbles we inhabit, to the point where we can imagine no other life, no other possibilities.

My rejection by my Jewish friends was matched by an early suspicion of my motives and my seriousness expressed by a few people in Tamra. An Israeli newspaper took pleasure in quoting a former Arab Knesset member and resident of Tamra, Mohammed Kaanan, when he was asked about me: ‘I want to believe she is an innocent woman working in the interests of the inhabitants here, but if a suspicion arises that she is working for an organisation that is against the Arab population that may harm her. We won’t stand for it.’ I was saddened by Kaanan’s comments, but understood where such distrust springs from: for the first two decades after the state of Israel was born the Arab minority lived under harsh military rule, and today their lives are still controlled by a special department of the Shin Bet security services, which runs a large network of informers inside Arab communities. In the circumstances good intentions from Jews are treated with caution.

Far more disorientating was the initial reaction of a Tamran woman who would later become one of my closest friends. I met Zeinab, an English teacher at the local high school, on my first trip to Tamra when I was doing research for Mahapach. In her home she greeted me warmly and invited me to sit with her and have coffee while we discussed the discrimination in education. She explained the smaller budgets for Arab schools, the bigger class sizes, the shorter learning days, the shoddy temporary buildings in which Arab children learn and which usually became permanent classrooms, the severe restrictions on what may be taught (restrictions that do not apply to Jewish children), and the rigid control exercised over the appointment of Arab teachers and principals by the security services, which weed out anyone with a known interest in politics or Palestinian history. She added that Jewish schoolchildren receive hidden benefits not afforded Arab pupils, such as double the school allowance if their parents serve in the army. I learned that by law all classrooms must be built with air conditioners, a requirement strictly enforced in the construction of Jewish schools, but usually ignored in Arab ones. And she explained that in most cases heating equipment, computers and books have to be bought by Arab parents because Arab schools lack funds to pay for them.

Then, after calmly informing me of this discrimination, her eyes turned glittery with suppressed anger and she asked: ‘Why all of a sudden are you so interested in the Arabs? Is it because of 9/11?’ It had not occurred to me that there was a connection between my being here in Tamra and what had occurred in New York. But her accusing tone suggested otherwise: it was as though she was saying, ‘We have been here all these years with the same problems and you Jews have always neglected us. Why the interest now?’ As our meeting came to a close she showed me to the door and said, ‘You are always welcome in an Arab home.’ I had rarely felt less welcome in my life. Although I felt confused by her barely contained rage, I was also impressed by her and wanted to know her better.

On my subsequent visits to the Galilee I always called on Zeinab, and she was one of the first people I informed of my planned relocation to Tamra. As the day of the move neared I rang her from Tel Aviv. She answered, saying she had been cleaning the house and thinking about me. I asked her what she was thinking. ‘I was wondering whether I will be able to trust you,’ she replied.

It was at this moment I started to understand the roots of Zeinab’s anger. I realised that she had always been let down by Jews, even those left-wingers who claimed to be on her side, and she had no reason to think I would be any different. The few co-existence groups in Israel operate mainly in the Galilee, often bringing together Jewish and Arab women, but they are almost always run by Jews, and the debate is always controlled and circumscribed by the group’s Jewish members. Off-limits is usually ‘politics’, which in effect means any discussion that touches on the power relationship between Jews and Arabs. These groups almost universally failed to survive the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000, precisely because the central concerns of their Arab members had never been addressed. The Jewish participants had not been prepared to make any sacrifices to promote equality, believing that if they did so they would undermine the thing they hold most dear, the eternal validity of a Jewish state. Allowing their Arab neighbours an independent voice was seen as threatening the Jewishness of Israel. I felt Zeinab had set me a test in her own mind, convinced I would betray her like all the other well-intentioned Jews she had known. I began to persuade her otherwise by the very fact of moving to Tamra; she was soon at my door with a bowl of beautiful cacti.

In those early days in Tamra I also came to understand that my image as a Jew was problematic. Months before my move, in the spring of 2002, Israel had launched a massive invasion of the West Bank, known as Operation Defensive Shield, in which the army reoccupied the towns that had passed to the control of the Palestinian Authority under the 1993 Oslo Accords. All summer and winter, families including my own in Tamra sat each night watching disturbing images on Israeli television and the Arab satellite channels of Israeli soldiers ransacking Palestinian homes in Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin, or of tanks ploughing down the streets, crushing anything in their way, from cars to electricity pylons. For the people in Tamra, as in other Israeli Arab communities, these were even more dispiriting times than normal. Many had held out the hope that with the arrival of a Palestinian state next door maybe they would finally come to be accepted as equal citizens of the Jewish state, rather than as a potential fifth column. Now they saw that hope unravelling before their eyes.

There were several disturbing incidents at this time which brought home to me the fact that I had little control over how my image as a Jew was being shaped and distorted by my country, my government and my army. One came when I joined Suad, then aged fifteen, for a walk on the far side of Tamra. We reached a spot where a group of a dozen or so children aged between seven and eleven were playing outside the neighbourhood homes. It is a point of honour for most Arab families that they and their children are immaculately dressed, but these children were wearing ragged clothes. When they saw us, they rushed out shouting to Suad: ‘Is she a Jew, is she a Jew?’ and ‘Jews are dirty, they kill people.’ Looking upset, Suad refused to translate straight away, and called out to them: ‘Stop it!’ She wanted to run, but I told her to stay calm. As we walked away, the children picked up stones from the roadside and threw them in our direction, though not strongly enough to hit us. It was a symbolic demonstration. Shaken, I thought afterwards that I understood their message: ‘We hate Jews, so stay away. They only ever bring trouble with them.’

On another occasion, when I was out with Samira, we took a shortcut through a school playground in front of a group of transfixed ten-year-olds. A few came running up behind me, shouting, ‘Yehudiya, Yehudiya!’ and throwing handfuls of leaves that I could feel caressing my back.

When I reflected on these incidents I understood that what most Arab children learn about Jews comes from the media, and what they see is violence, oppression and abuse. The image of the strong, aggressive Israel that had so enthralled me in my early Zionist days I now saw in a very different light. These children—lacking the sophistication to discriminate between the media image of the Jew as an ever-present, menacing soldier and the reality of many kinds of Jews living in different circumstances all around the world—related to me in the only way they knew how. They saw the children of Jenin or Ramallah throwing stones at the Jewish soldiers, and now they were mimicking them.

This problem of my image as a Jew was illuminated for me on another occasion when I visited the home of Asad Ghanem. As he introduced me to his two young children, they asked: ‘Is your friend who doesn’t speak like us a Jew?’ Asad answered: ‘Yes, but she’s a good Jew.’ I had been reclassified in a way that shocked me: I was not a human being, not an Israeli, and not even a Jew, but a ‘good Jew’. I came to realise that for most Arab children living in Israel their first lesson—something they learn from watching what happens in Jenin, Nablus, Hebron or Gaza—is that Jews are bad. They have to be taught that not all Jews kill and destroy. This is something the older children understand: they have learned it as part of their survival training for later life, when they will have to venture into a society which will mostly treat them as an enemy. When they are old enough to leave the safety of Tamra, they must know when to conceal their Arabness and keep their mouths shut.

When I think of those children throwing stones at me, I don’t get angry with them but with all those Jews who tell me that the Palestinians living inside Israel are unaffected by the occupation, that it has nothing to do with them. They forget or choose to ignore the fact that, although Palestinian citizens of Israel are separated from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza by the reality that one has citizenship and the other does not,

(#litres_trial_promo) the bonds of their shared nationality—the fact that they are all Palestinians—are far stronger. Many Palestinian citizens, whether living in Tamra, Nazareth or Haifa, have family living under occupation in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, or in extreme poverty in Lebanon and Syria. When they see a child being shot in Jenin or Nablus, it could be a cousin or a nephew. Even progressive Jews appear deeply blocked in understanding this reality. When I explained the complex identity problems faced by Israeli Arabs to a left-wing friend from Tel Aviv who belongs to Rabbis for Human Rights, an organisation which vehemently opposes the occupation, he told me simply: ‘But they live in the state of Israel. The occupation doesn’t touch them.’

How wrong he is was proved one evening while I was still smarting from the stone-throwing incident. I was sitting in my home with a group of twelve Arab friends watching a video of Mohammed Bakri’s controversial documentary film Jenin Jenin, originally banned in Israel and a powerful record of the traumatic effects on Jenin’s inhabitants of the violent invasion by Israel of the West Bank city in the spring of 2002. It was a disturbing moment at many levels. Sitting there as the only Jew, I was aware that I had to choose where I stood in this battle between two peoples, and that I had to be committed to the cause of justice and humanity. I watched the film through my Arab friends’ eyes, learning exactly how they see us Jews as occupiers and oppressors. It made me question very deeply how I had been able to identify with a country that could send its child soldiers to behave in this fashion.

The film prompted in me a recollection of a conversation I had had on one of my increasingly rare and strained visits to my religious cousins, Jeffrey and Doreen, in Ashdod shortly after Operation Defensive Shield. Their granddaughter’s husband, a medic in the reserves, had been sent to the Jenin area, and Doreen was apoplectic at the media suggestions that there had been a massacre there. ‘Good Jewish boys who serve in the Israel Defence Forces like our Ofer don’t harm people,’ she asserted confidently. And then, as if providing the proof, she told me that Ofer had even been asked by his commanders to give medical assistance to a Palestinian woman who was having a heart attack during the invasion. This level of naïety and self-satisfaction I found profoundly unsettling. I told her: ‘The reality is that no one can know what their children get up to in a war. Soldiers carry secrets they will never divulge to their families.’

Although I am sure there are soldiers who attempt to hold onto their humanist values while in uniform, I am also convinced that the inherent immorality of enforcing an occupation makes good intentions almost futile. Worse than this, there is plenty of evidence that many soldiers lose their judgement entirely under the pressure of the barbaric tasks they are ordered to carry out. One need only consider the reports in the Hebrew media of the high suicide rates in the army, of the number of soldiers who are receiving psychological help and counselling, or who are discharged from duty, to know the truth of this. But on this matter Israelis are in deep denial.

Later, after visiting Jenin, I was convinced that something terrible had happened there, and that atrocities had been carried out by the Israeli army. When I watched the film, before I had been there, I was unprepared for the horrifying details of what had taken place, and of the terrible destruction wrought on the inhabitants’ lives as well as on the centre of Jenin camp. Watching the survivors, broken-hearted amid the rubble of their homes, hopeless and with an understanding that their voice would never be properly heard, I felt their rage. It dismayed me to realise that I too was seeing the Israeli army, full of those ‘good Jewish boys’, as a terrorist army, and that for the first time I was beginning to understand the emotions that can drive a suicide bomber to action. I could see how unfair it sounds to a Palestinian to hear a suicide bomber being labelled a terrorist when we refuse to do the same if an Israeli soldier bulldozes a house with a family inside.

As I attempted to cope with these images on the screen, I was also confronted by the unexpected reactions of my Arab friends watching alongside me. Afterwards we talked about the film, and though I felt near to tears, as they spoke about the horrifying events they were smiling. I vividly remember Heba from my family recalling one particularly unpleasant scene, when an old man tells of being shot in the leg at close range by a soldier, and all the while she maintained a fixed smile. I thought: ‘Is this a mask, is this the only way she can contain her emotions, suppress the pain? And if it is, is the mask reserved for me, the Jew here, or is it one they maintain with each other too?’ The answer possibly came when the group got up to leave. Zeinab turned to me at the door and said, with the same fixed smile and glittering angry eyes I had seen before: ‘Sweet dreams.’ It was as if I had been hit in the stomach. I desperately wanted to say, ‘But that’s not me, don’t hold me responsible, I’m with you.’ But anything I said would have been inadequate. Maybe that night was the ultimate test for me in Zeinab’s eyes. Maybe she thought I would go running home to Tel Aviv the next day. But I didn’t; I stayed. And afterwards my friendship with Zeinab deepened and strengthened.

Listening to and coming to understand the Palestinian narrative was an important part of unlearning my lifelong Zionist training, which had dismissed the Palestinians’ history and culture as irrelevant or non-existent. One of the most poignant episodes occurred when I was reading the autobiography of the Jerusalem doctor Mufid Abdul Hadi, which had been given to me by his nephew, Dr Mahdi Abdul Hadi, the director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (Passia), based in Jerusalem. There is a moving passage concerning his escape, along with many other refugees, from Palestine in 1948, after the Israeli state was declared. It concludes with a scene on a boat, al-Malik Fuad, which heads for Sweden packed with Palestinian refugees being taken away, most of them forever, from their homeland and their families. ‘When al-Malik Fuad lifted its anchor and began its westward-bound journey, it met another ship going in the opposite direction. Its gunwale was occupied by hundreds of singing and rejoicing people, who were greeting “The Promised Land” for the first time. The happy people greeted our ship by waving the Jewish state’s flag.’

Here was the flipside of the Exodus story that inspired my love affair with Israel. In all my time as a teenager learning my people’s history I had never been encouraged to think in those terms, that our people’s rejoicing came at the cost of another’s bereavement. The Zionist story I had learned was that this country was ‘a land without people’. But here was one of those supposedly non-existent Palestinians telling me his story of loss and betrayal. I thought how much we could change history if we could raise Jewish children with that simple understanding.

The obstacles to doing it are huge. The apparent inability of Jews in Israel and the Diaspora to address the true roots of the Middle East conflict and accept their role in the Palestinians’ suffering is given an alibi by their fears, which are in turn stoked by stories in the media of the ever-present threat of anti-Semitism, a Jew-hatred in both Europe and the Arab world that we are warned has troubling echoes of the period before the Second World War. A disproportionate part of the media coverage of anti-Semitism concentrates on tarring critics of Israel with this unpleasant label. Anyone who has disturbing things to say about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is, on this interpretation, an anti-Semite. I have little doubt that the motivation of Israel’s defenders in many cases is to silence the critics, whether their criticisms are justified or not.

My own critique of Israel, that it is a state that promotes a profoundly racist view of Arabs and enforces a system of land apartheid between the two populations, risks being treated in the same manner. So how does one reach other Jews and avoid this charge of anti-Semitism?

Given the sensitivities of Jews after their history of persecution, I think it helps if we distinguish between making a comparison and drawing a parallel. What do I mean? A comparison is essentially a tool for making quantitative judgements: my suffering is greater or lesser than yours, or the same. Jews have a tendency to demand exclusive rights to certain comparisons, such as that nothing can be worse than the Holocaust, because it involved the attempt to kill a whole people on an unprecedented industrial scale. Anyone who challenges that exclusive right, for example by suggesting that Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland, is therefore dismissed as an anti-Semite. The debate immediately gets sidetracked into the question of whether the argument is anti-Semitic rather than whether it is justified.

Drawing a parallel works slightly differently. It refuses, rightly, to make lazy comparisons: Israel is neither Nazi Germany nor apart-heid South Africa. It is unique. Instead a parallel suggests that the circumstances people find themselves in can be similar, or that one set of events can echo another. Even more importantly, the emotions people feel in these circumstances may share something of the same quality. That common quality is what allows us to see their suffering as relevant and deserving of recognition, without dragging us into a debate about whose suffering is greater.

I will give an example from my first few weeks in Tamra. I had been visiting families and hearing stories of what had happened to them in the war of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were either deported or terrorised from their homes by the Israeli army to refugee camps across the Middle East. This is an event commemorated by Palestinians as the Nakba (the Catastrophe), the loss of their homeland to the Jewish state and the dissolution of the Palestinian people as a nation. 150,000 or so Palestinians managed to avoid this fate, remaining within the borders of the new state of Israel and becoming Israeli citizens. Nonetheless, many of them had experiences similar to the refugees: all the members of my own family in Tamra, for example, were internally displaced in the 1948 war. They lost their homes and most of their possessions when they were forced to flee from villages in the Galilee.

The family of Hassan’s wife, Samira, were expelled from a small coastal village near Haifa called Ein Hod. She once tried to visit Ein Hod to see her parents’ home, which still stands but for decades has been occupied by Jews. When she knocked on the door to ask whether she could look inside, the Jewish owners angrily told her to go away. She has not dared go back since. When I talk to Samira I see the pain she feels at being uprooted, at living only a short distance from her family’s home, but having no access to it or right to reclaim it. In fact, she does not even have the right to a history: the state refuses to remember her story, commemorate it or teach it to new generations. Her past is denied her, which damages her sense of who she is. It is a feeling we Jews should know only too well. After all, Jews have campaigned for the right to reclaim their properties in Europe, seek restitution, win recognition of the wrongs done them, and build museums. In this battle they have been increasingly successful. Why is Samira’s pain not equally worthy of acknowledgement?

This lesson was reinforced by Rasha, a bright eighteen-year-old girl to whom I taught English and who is hoping to go to Haifa University to study psychotherapy. During a tutorial I asked her how she felt about life in Tamra, and she replied that she always felt afraid. This was clearly a sensitive topic, and I proceeded carefully. I asked her what she knew of her family history, such as where her parents were born. She said they were born in Tamra. And what about your grandparents, I asked. She said she knew they weren’t from Tamra. ‘They came from a village,’ she added, only revealing with hesitancy that they were among the hundreds of thousands of refugees forced out of some four hundred villages by Israeli soldiers in the 1948 war. I asked if her parents ever talked about this with her at home. ‘No, because they are afraid too,’ she said. ‘I ask them questions, but they don’t like to talk about it.’

Rasha, it struck me, was living in fear of connecting with her past and her roots. Her eyes filled with tears. I thought, this is the story of this country. How can we educate our Jewish children about the Holocaust, the centuries of discrimination against Jews, and yet here sitting next to me is a Palestinian child who has been forced by the Jewish state to cut herself off emotionally and psychologically from both her personal and her people’s narratives, who is truly afraid to learn about her past? I asked her how she felt about not knowing the truth, and not being able to talk about it in her home. She replied: ‘I don’t feel like I have a future.’

Other families told me of the massacres that took place in their villages and of the tactics used by soldiers to terrify them from their homes. These are not fanciful stories: they are supported by the research of respected Israeli Jewish historians who have spent years trawling Israel’s state and military archives.